See the new eyes on the sky as fixed wing planes get ready to patrol North East Lincolnshire from the air.

Four new National Police Air Service aeroplanes are now at Doncaster, the base which looks after the air services for Lincolnshire and Humberside.

Each of the brightly-coloured Vulcanair P68s aircraft will have UK registration markings.

They are fitted with L3 WESCAM MX15 state of the art cameras.

Work is underway for all four new aircraft to achieve air worthiness and police operational certification before they can begin flying from the former RAF Finningley airbase at Doncaster. That process is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

National Police Air Service Base under construction in 2017, at the Doncaster Sheffield Airport. Picture: @NPASDoncasterSA twitter account (Image: Submitted picture)

A statement from the National Police Air Service said: "When the aeroplanes are operational, they will be deployed from NPAS’ Doncaster base. They will join the existing fleet of helicopters, which fly from 13 other NPAS bases."

A total of £3.3million was spent creating a new purpose-built airbase for NPAS at Doncaster.

The new planes are cheaper to run and maintain than rotary aircraft. They have greater endurance than helicopters and will mean that police air assets will be able to stay ‘on station’ for longer periods of time than helicopters.

She asked the then policing minister, Nick Hurd what assessment he had made of the effectiveness of fixed wing aircraft compared to helicopters in providing air support to police operations.

The Grimsby MP also demanded what assessment had been made of the effect of the loss of a force-specific police helicopter on the quality of air support in the Humberside area and whether Humberside Police officers had been recruited to the new airbase at Doncaster.

Melanie Onn MP for Grimsby, aiming for an improved police air service for North East Lincolnshire (Image: Rick Byrne)

The minister said: "The operational performance of the service, decisions as to how aircraft are deployed and recruitment are matters for NPAS and the Strategic Board which oversees its work, comprised of Chief Constables and Police and Crime Commissioners.

He said The Home Office did not collect information on the performance of NPAS and how the police will use the new fixed-wing planes to complement their existing helicopter fleet "is an operational matter for NPAS."

Police officers from all English and Welsh Forces were invited to apply for secondments in NPAS through a recruitment campaign. But it is understood none of the successful candidates are from Humberside.

The latest report from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services found "The level of service provided to many forces is lower than we expected to find, and many incidents are over before an aircraft can reach the scene."

In the past 10 years the number of police aircraft has reduced from 33 to 19 and there is now less than half the number of flying hours on operations than there were 10 years ago.

The new Vulcanair P68 is based at Doncaster (Image: NPAS)

The HMIC report said: "There is some evidence to suggest that police officers are making less use of air support because it takes too long to arrive. In 2016, helicopters were cancelled by forces during transit to an incident on over 40 percent of occasions, which frontline officers told us repeatedly was because incidents are often over before air support can arrive."

The arrival of the new aircraft is aimed at increasing the air service response.

They will be used, as all other police aircraft, in searches for high-risk missing people.

Latest figures show of the 22,400 calls for service nationally between 2017 and 2018, nearly 18,000 were for searches for missing or injured people with 6,706 were searches for suspects and 1,705 for vehicle pursuits.

Grimsby Live issued a Freedom of Information request to obtain details of the service to people in North East Lincolnshire. The figures showed that an NPAS helicopter only responded to 68 requests in Grimsby in a 12-month period.

Humberside Police's Oscar 99 helicopter, which served the force area until September (Image: Scunthorpe Live)

That is compared to 512 flights to North East Lincolnshire between 2014 and 2015, prior to Force Helicopter 'Oscar 99's' mandatory departure from Humberside airport.

The figures also revealed there had been a total of 1,044 requests for service in the Humberside force area between December 2017 and November last year and deployed only 593 times .

Nearly a third of those flights were to assist in the search for missing people, and 147 were to help trace suspects.

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